Finally, your mother isn’t unhappy. She is dead.
‘Suzanne?’
You turn toward your father. Achilles. He is thinner, stooped, but his eyes are still sharp and deeply kind.
You tell him that your mother didn’t wear lipstick. He answers that she should have. He extends his hand to Gary. The two men greet each other. Gary is a child. You feel it in your father’s eyes.
Achilles hesitates. Then his body leans toward you. He takes you in his arms, which are still robust. Quickly. As if he were picking you. He wants to make sure he can take a piece of you before you disappear again.
Which you are ready to do.
Hiding in your wake, Gary follows you to the exit. Your sister Claire snarls at you as you pass. She is faded under her habit, and her firmness surprises you. She approaches you and asks to speak to you.
So in front of the funeral home, your veiled little sister brings you up to date. That François, your son, has run away. That he is sixteen years old. You notice her eyes watching Gary. Who could be the same age. She goes on. François left the foster home in Val d’Or where he grew up. The family of undertakers that took him in fell apart after the death of his adoptive mother.
François spent his childhood helping his new father embalm people. He learned to comb dead hair, to hem the dead’s last pants, maybe to put a bit of lipstick on the mouth of a dead person who dreamed of wearing some.
The undertaker’s new wife didn’t like François. She beat him.
So François left the home.
‘He wanted to find you.’
On the train on the way back to Montreal, you surprise yourself by looking outside, searching the passing countryside. Between the empty fields and the stripped forests, you are looking for your missing son.
Gary has monsters under his skin. He is extremely gentle, speaks little, smiles sometimes. He is in the habit of doing his hair by tracing a thin part down the right side of his delicate head. He rarely looks you in the eye. When he does, you make love. Or rather you make love to him. You wrap around him gently. Like a lullaby.
He comes alive at night. He gets up, breathless. Checks the deadbolt on the apartment once, then ten times. Seals the window with his fingertips to prevent the wind from reaching him. The wind makes him crazy.
You wait for it to pass. You serve him a drink, which he downs in one. He calms down a little. Enough so that you can pull him against you, where he huddles up. You like feeling his clammy skin against your breasts. He is short of breath, like a baby bird. You bandage his wounds with your long hands. You caress him. He goes back to sleep.
You share an apartment on Rue McGill in Montreal.
Books are lined along the hallway, awaiting their turn. Gary picks one at random and samples passages, feeding your desire to add to the collection.
And you go out for a few hours late in the afternoon, bringing him back a used book and a bottle of whisky.
While out on one of these forays, you find a job as a secretary at the railway workers’ union on Rue Sainte-Catherine. A job that doesn’t commit you to anything, which you do well and which you can quickly put out of your mind, going straight home to put all your energy into taking care of Gary.
Mousse is eighteen. She is a hostess at Expo ’67. She is stunningly beautiful. Dark and slim.
A clay animal, fresh breezes, and plenty of cracks. Lava gushes from her wounds.
Mousse grew up with her aunts. She studied at boarding school, which she hated. Then she started studying communications at Université de Québec à Montréal.
One morning, she gets a call from Claire Meloche, her mother’s sister.
She has found François, her little brother. Mousse hasn’t seen him since they were separated.
Claire asks her if she wants to see him. Mousse says yes.
A run-down hospital. Several flights of stairs that Mousse slowly climbs. She is wearing a long skirt and laced boots. What do you wear for a reunion with your brother?
She tucks the stray strands of hair behind her ears.
‘It’s me.’ ‘It’s Mousse.’ ‘I’m your sister.’ ‘Do you remember me?’
How do you introduce yourself to the one who was left behind?
Floors go by. Behind each door is thick glass. Faraway voices, the occasional scream. The smell of overcooked food and medication.
François is on the top floor.
‘He has a view of the sky,’ the lady at reception said kindly.
Mousse rings at the door. This one has bars. Not just anyone can enter the mental ward.
A man in a white coat comes to open it.
‘I’m here to meet my little brother.’
Mousse enters the mental ward. There is compartmentalized chaos. Men and women who have stepped out of their bodies are spontaneously erupting. No one holds back, everyone is spilling over with something. Some are singing, others are crying, still others are yelling or laughing.
But there is natural light. And it’s true that from here you can see the sky.
Mousse looks for François. Her little brother with the chubby cheeks and the incredibly long eyelashes.
But he is the one who finds her.
‘Mousse?’
He recognizes her. Skinny and gaunt, tall and damaged, François walks toward his sister, ready to take her in his arms, his sister who has finally come back.
And in a sunny corner, with the sounds of the mad reverberating off them, Mousse and François tell each other about their lives.
He speaks in a voice that’s all surface, a voice so soft that it can’t help but soothe. François has taken refuge in the space in his head where he can’t be hurt anymore. He tells Mousse that she looks like an angel. Mousse takes his hand. Fire and water meet, on the top floor of the tower of the insane. She is incandescent; he is aquatic. Each one has saved their skin as best they can.
Mousse strokes her little brother’s rough cheeks.
He has put makeup on the dead and swallowed drugs.
He has fucked entire streets for warmth and money.
Now he hears voices. Sometimes gentle, sometimes angry.
He is so happy to be reunited with Mousse.
He shoves his hand in his pocket and takes out his wallet, from which he pulls an old piece of paper that has been folded and unfolded a thousand times over. With his long nails, he unfolds it.
A blue umbrella in a downpour.
Mousse leaves François in the sun.
Mousse has found her little brother. Now she can’t die.
She will come back to visit him.
She will finish her drawing for him, which she will hang on the sterile walls of his room.
She will add a girl and a boy under the blue umbrella.
But it’s too late to rescue him.
You take Gary in your arms and crack his shell. Even held like this, his body stays rigid for a moment, hunched, a painful implosion.
You start the music. Robert Charlebois. Let me take you to my Boulé, my whistling river Boulé. Give me your hand and hang on tight, just run for a mile, on smooth rocks and logs, surrounded by water, watch you don’t fall, give me your hand or you’ll slip, watch you don’t get wet! And you dance. You dance with him pressed against you. You dance from your stomach and your loins. You dazzle him with your joyful, grounded strength. You are body to body, mouth to mouth, you pull him toward you. You make sure he is glued to the life he has left. And the water the water whistling like a lamb pissing.
Gary takes a bath, which you run for him. You make him spaghetti while he reads his second book of the day. You hear him laugh. It makes you feel unbelievably good.
The phone rings.
You answer. It’s Mousse. She tells you she has found François. And that he wants to see you.
You feel trapped. The vice doesn’t close around you but, rather, inside you. Your whole chest compresses.
You hang up.
The spaghetti is perfectly cooked.
; Gary comes to curl up against you. Against your neck, your thighs, the folds of your body. He takes refuge there for a moment.
Sometimes his fingers travel along the tracks of your skin, spreading waves of shivers and stories of heroes moving through the dense jungle that is too vast for them.
Just like every afternoon for almost three years now, you go to the corner bookstore.
The shelf in the back is filled with used books. Classics, particularly mysteries, which Gary loves. You like sinking your nose into them before reading a few lines. From their smell, you can tell who has read them, and how many times. You can guess their age and their story.
You fill your arms with new stories, which allow your man to escape, to momentarily leave Vietnam, which is still eating away at him from the inside.
Your skin and the books will save him.
You pay. You keep just enough money for the daily bottle of whisky.
As you are leaving, the newspaper catches your eye. The face of Claude Gauvreau. Your friend from another life.
You grab the paper, clutching it, to read what is written. Claude killed himself. Jumped out of a window. He was impaled at the end of his fall.
He had just signed a contract with the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, where his last play will be performed.
He was afraid of being loved.
You crumple your ranting friend’s face, and you shove it in your pocket.
He gave a voice to the lost words that belonged to no one.
He has gone to find them.
The sun eats at your face. You walk with your fist gripped around the newspaper, Claude’s face seeping into your palm. You would have liked to have said goodbye to him.
A man steps in front of you. He calls you Mom. You freeze.
As you confront his gentle, childlike features, you suit up. An invisible, sharp, metal cope covers you and protects you. You coldly study the image before you. Thin hair that the sun dusts and gets tangled in. A broad forehead that is older than the rest of the face. Huge, penetrating eyes.
With a subdued voice, François tells you that he is glad he found you. That he’s been looking for you for a long time. He pulls a bit of change from his pocket, which he shows you in a naive gesture that unsettles you. He invites you for a coffee. He knows where you can get a good one that’s cheap.
You tell him you’re in a rush. You tell him you can’t. You tell him that someone is waiting for you.
You don’t tell him he is handsome. You don’t tell him he should get his big coat cleaned and cut his long hair.
You disappear, trailing your heavy, rusted carapace behind you.
You go home without the bottle. You will go back out to get it. You need to hide away. In a cave where it will be easier for you to pretend.
You go home and head to your room, where you normally find Gary, curled up, awaiting your return. But he’s not there. You go back to the kitchen, muttering his name.
‘Gary?’
And you see him.
His long legs swaying in front of the window. His arms hanging limply down his body, having finally stopped trembling. His child’s face is tilted to one side like the first time he looked at you. He is blue, suffocated, the rope firmly knotted around his broken neck.
You creep toward him, as if you might wake him.
You grab the chair that has toppled over; you stand on it and jam your fingers into the knotted lumps of the rope that has just killed the man you love. The one you couldn’t save.
The one you grab hold of with both arms and lift to take to your bed where you hold him and rock him as you cry.
You failed again.
The police come the next morning to pronounce him dead. You spent your last night with him.
Now you’re alone. Again.
1974–1981
You move. You leave everything behind. You find a room where you hang a hammock. You fill the fridge with booze, and you don’t go out anymore.
You are forty-eight. And you don’t give a shit about anything.
You get drunk and you fuck.
You fuck dirty. Only young men. Who you pick up in the street, in cafés, in bars. Because you smell like sex.
You invite them back to your place for a drink. You keep passing the bottle, you get undressed, you suck them off and you come.
You lose yourself in young flesh and become a landing place for thirsty male bodies.
Mousse has lost François. He left with nothing. Except a bag filled with teddy bears. He walks the streets with them. When night falls, he is rocked by his inner voices, a sacred circle that never leaves him on his own. François wants a family.
One morning his face appears in the window across the way. You are naked, holding a glass. And in front of you, an angelic face, framed with long grey hair, stares at you.
François has found you. He has rented the little alcove across the street from your house where, while he can’t talk to you, at least he can look at you.
You stay like that for a moment, facing him. Your lost little boy. On the other side, his eyes are shining, and he smiles at you.
You smile back. As best you can. Your smile muscles seem to have atrophied, and it requires a super-human effort. You smile at him because you know that you will never be able to forgive yourself. You know that the forgiveness you have to beg for is simply too great.
You close the curtains on the face of your son, whom you haven’t touched in twenty years.
And perhaps to feel closer to him, you go mad too.
You are hot and cold. You feel like you’re being tracked by a pack of lame wolves.
They lock you up.
You share a hospital room with a young woman, whose moaning cuts through the night.
You know that everyone is talking about you behind your back. You glare at them and shout that you understand everything.
They take care of you. You let them. You need someone to take care of you.
Your sister Claire comes to your bedside and strokes your hair. She tells you that you will get out soon, if you listen to the doctors.
Her voice reaches you as an echo, and you cover your ears. You’re tired.
Claire dims the light in your little room. She holds out a glass of water to you. She waits for you to calm down. And she tells you that your daughter, Mousse, is giving birth.
Just a few floors away.
You wait for night to fall. You swap your hospital gown for a white smock.
You run your hands through your hair and put a bit of blush on your cheeks.
You feel diffuse, dissipated in the medicated air of the mad. You are swept along in a foggy momentum. Nothing like courage, but a gentle force that moves you toward the few steps to climb to your daughter.
You cross the maternity ward on tiptoe. Something inside you is whispering that you have the right to be there.
At reception, you ask for Madame Barbeau’s room.
They point the way, and you follow it with your head held high. You knock and go in.
It’s the woman you see first. Your spirited daughter. Her eyes bore into you, pierce you, crucify you.
She calls you Mom. And this time you answer yes. Without even hesitating.
‘It’s a girl,’ she tells you.
You are happy. On an impulse, you approach her, a lump of joy caught in your throat.
Your grown-up daughter looks away from you to cover her child.
Round and still warm, she is resting in her arms as if they had been custom made for her. She feeds hungrily, already very much alive.
Every part of you that was floating comes slowly down to the ground. You take root again in spite of yourself. You drink from this spring of pain; for a moment you are back in your forgotten body.
The child is now resting on her breast. Mousse briefly raises her eyes.
She studies you from a distance. Remembers only the void left in your wake.
The perfume of your absence is stronger than the perfume on you
r throat. She will live on that smell of emptiness, planning her days so that they are always full.
You are proud of your daughter. She has won. She has created a next chapter for all of you, which she will spend her whole life writing.
You have the impression that Mousse is clutching the newborn in her arms. That she will not let you approach. But her voice rises from somewhere deep down and asks you, while tightening her embrace, if you want to hold the baby.
So you lean over and gently undo the loving knots, raising one of your daughter’s delicate arms, then the other, and you take me in your cold hands.
You lift me to your chest. I look like Mousse.
You are twenty-five again, and you feel the desire for new beginnings.
You have let your life go by, impenetrable to the world.
Mousse holds her arms out to you, and you want to give her back everything you took away.
You place me in the crook of her arm, and you leave the room, a bit of you lingering in the air and on our skin.
You made a hole in my mother, and I’m the one who will fill it.
1981–2009
You live like a hermit in a high-rise building. Buddha and the Rideau Canal outside your window are practically your only companions.
You practice meditation. You try to leave your body, which you can no longer stand.
You have gone back to hide out in Ottawa. You shave your head. You dissolve into the air.
You practice zazen, which advocates a return to oneself, and it comforts you in your reclusion.
You find a spiritual master in the States. You write to him, ‘I believe that at this point in my life the answer is: now as the only path.’
You plunge your hands into soil, transplant bulbs that you then water. They don’t grow, but you keep trying.
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